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About The IGF

IndieGames.com is presented by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, which runs the Independent Games Festival & Summit every year at Game Developers Conference. The company (producer of the Game Developers Conference series, Gamasutra.com and Game Developer magazine) established the Independent Games Festival in 1998 to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers.

Hello! I'm Andrew Plotkin. The IndieGames folks have invited me to start posting about news in the world of interactive fiction and other narrative-text-game-experiment-y things.

Of course, those experimenty things have been appearing in this blog all along. (I see posts about Twine, about Christine Love, about Dominique Pamplemousse... just in the past week.) But I come out of the old-school, parser-based IF world, so hopefully that will provide a new perspective.

To start, a small flood of links! (Don't worry, I will also be pointing about specific games in future posts.)

â€¢ The 2013 IF Spring Thing is now in progress. This is an annual competition for long-form interactive fiction. (As distinct from the annual short IF comp in the fall.) Spring Thing has three entries this year -- two parser-based, one Twine.

â€¢ We've also got the 2012 XYZZY Awards. These are the IF community's annual best-of-the-year awards. It's first-round voting, which means a list of some 400 nominated games -- perhaps too many for a blog post. But! It makes a good lead-in to...